I Let People In Anyway

Fourteen months.

That is roughly how long it has been since somebody who is not family sat down in your front room.

It did not happen as a decision. Nobody was turned away. What happened is that invitations stopped being issued, one at a time, for a reason each time that was true on its own.

Not this week, it is a bit much at the moment. Better to meet out, easier for everybody. We will do it when we have sorted the back room.

Fourteen months of individually reasonable postponements, which add up to a man who does not have people in his house any more.

And the cost of that has not landed on the house. It has landed on your friendships, quietly, because a man who only ever meets people out is a man whose friends have never seen where he lives, and after a while that is a specific kind of distance.

I want to put this one plainly. The back room is not going to be sorted before the friendship needs it.

And there is a woman in Acts who did the opposite of what you have been doing, in one sentence, and the New Testament records her name because of it.

Come into my house and sit down

There is a moment in Acts where a woman issues an invitation with no preamble at all.

And when she was baptized, and her household, she besought us, saying, If ye have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come into my house, and abide there. And she constrained us. (Acts 16:15, King James Version)

Come into my house and abide there. That is it. No description of the house, no apology, no proposal to meet somewhere else in the meantime.

And the word at the end is constrained, which means she insisted. She pressed them. There is no version of this where she is managing how her home will be received.

You are able to open that door as the house is, and the state of it has never once been the price of admission. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a man who has not had anybody in for fourteen months, and Acts 16:15 records an invitation with no condition on the room attached.

And notice what her invitation is based on.

If ye have judged me to be faithful to the Lord. The basis is who she is, not what the house is like. She offers the one and says nothing about the other, and the passage treats that as entirely normal.

You are the basis of your own invitation, and a room has never once been what anybody was actually being invited into. The written word grounds the hospitality in the person and says nothing whatsoever about the premises, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a man whose friends have never seen where he lives.

What the postponements cost

Let me count it, because each one was reasonable and the total is not.

Fourteen months. Say twelve occasions where somebody would have come. Twelve evenings that happened somewhere else or did not happen.

And the specific thing lost is not the evening. It is that a friendship that has never been in your house is being conducted entirely on neutral ground, and neutral ground is a thinner place. People say different things in a front room than they say in a pub.

You have been conducting your friendships on thin ground, and the thinness has never once been because you are less hospitable than anybody. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a man who has postponed twelve evenings for reasons that were each true, and Acts 16:15 has a woman press her own house on people within minutes of meeting them.

And there is a thing your friends do not know, which is the loneliest part.

They think you prefer meeting out. Not one of them knows there is a back room in it. So the whole arrangement looks, from their side, like a preference, and there is nobody in your life who could offer to help or say it does not matter.

You have been alone with something your friends would have waved away, and it has never once been a thing any of them would have minded. The written word makes an invitation out of a person and not a property, and the Spirit of God is the one who steadies a man whose closest friends have the wrong idea entirely.

Leaving something out on purpose

So here is tonight, which is small and is a rehearsal.

Leave one thing out on purpose and go to bed.

That is a rehearsal for being seen. It is the same muscle: a thing is visible, you do not deal with it, and the world continues.

You are rehearsing being seen, and a rehearsal has never once required an audience. The Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man going up to bed past something he left out, and Acts 16:15 has a woman constrain people into a house she never described.

And then, when you can, do the real one.

Ask somebody round. This week, not after the back room. Say come round Thursday, and when they arrive, move the thing off the chair without apologizing for it having been there, and sit down.

You are able to ask somebody this week and never after the back room, and that room has never once been what they were coming to see. The written word bases the invitation on who a person is, and the Spirit of God is the one present with a man clearing a chair without saying a word about it.